The Slave Ship (7 page)

Sharks followed the slavers all the way across the Atlantic into American ports, as suggested by a notice from Kingston, Jamaica, that appeared in various newspapers in 1785: “The many Guineamen lately arrived here have introduced such a number of overgrown sharks, (The constant attendants on the vessels from the coasts) that bathing in the river is become extremely dangerous, even above town. A very large one was taken on Sunday, along side the Hibberts, Capt. Boyd.” Abolitionists would do much to publicize the terror of sharks in the slave trade, but this evidence comes from a slave society, before the rise of the abolitionist movement. More came from Captain Hugh Crow, who made ten slaving voyages and wrote from personal observation that sharks “have been known to follow vessels across the ocean, that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard.”
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Slaving captains consciously used sharks to create terror throughout the voyage. They counted on sharks to prevent the desertion of their seamen and the escape of their slaves during the long stays on the coast of Africa required to gather a human “cargo.” Naval officers used the fear of sharks, too. In the late 1780s, an African sailor from Cape Coast, who had been brought to Jamaica by a Liverpool Guineaman and somehow managed to escape slavery and find a berth on a man-of-war, killed a shark that had made it dangerous for sailors to swim or bathe around the vessel. He might have been a hero to his mates, but the commanding officer took a different view. As it happened, that shark had “prevented a number of desertions,” so the African sailor “got a merciless flogging” for killing it. Naval officers were even said to feed sharks to keep them around their vessels.
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So well known was the conscious use of terror by the slave captain to create social discipline that when Oliver Goldsmith came to write the natural history of sharks in 1774, he drew heavily on the lore of the slave trade. The histories of terrorism and zoology intersected. Goldsmith recounted two instances:

 
A second case was even more gruesome. Another captain facing a “rage for suicide” seized upon a woman “as a proper example to the rest.” He ordered the woman tied with a rope under her armpits and lowered into the water: “When the poor creature was thus plunged in, and about half way down, she was heard to give a terrible shriek, which at first was ascribed to her fears of drowning; but soon after, the water appearing red all around her, she was drawn up, and it was found that a shark, which had followed the ship, had bit her off from the middle.” Other slave-ship captains practiced a kind of sporting terror, using human remains to troll for sharks: “Our way to entice them was by Towing overboard a dead Negro, which they would follow till they had eaten him up.”
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CHAPTER 2

The Evolution of the Slave Ship

Thomas Gordon introduced his book
Principles of Naval Architecture
(1784) with a sweeping statement: “As a Ship is undoubtedly the no-blest, and one of the most useful machines that ever was invented, every attempt to improve it becomes a matter of importance, and merits the consideration of mankind.” He captured, as a naval architect should, the tall ship’s combination of grandeur and utility as he suggested the importance of its technical refinement and specialization. He noted that the progress of naval architecture could not be confined to this or that nation but belonged properly to all of mankind, whom the ship had helped to connect around the globe. Perhaps most important, he saw the ship as a machine, one of the most useful ever invented. He knew, of course, that the European deep-sea sailing ship—of which the slave ship was a variant—had helped to transform the world from the era of Christopher Columbus to his own time. It was the historic vessel for the emergence of capitalism, a new and unprecedented social and economic system that remade large parts of the world beginning in the late sixteenth century. It was also the material setting, the stage, for the enactment of the high human drama of the slave trade.
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The origins and genesis of the slave ship as a world-changing machine go back to the late fifteenth century, when the Portuguese made their historic voyages to the west coast of Africa, where they bought gold, ivory, and human beings. These early “explorations” marked the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. They were made possible by a new evolution of the sailing ship, the full-rigged, three-masted carrack, the forerunner of the vessels that would eventually carry Europeans to all parts of the earth, then carry millions of Europeans and Africans to the New World, and finally earn Thomas Gordon’s admiration.
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As Carlo Cipolla explained in his classic work
Guns, Sails, and Empires
, the ruling classes of Western European states were able to conquer the world between 1400 and 1700 because of two distinct and soon powerfully combined technological developments. First, English craftsmen forged cast-iron cannon, which were rapidly disseminated to military forces all around Europe. Second, the deep-sea sailing “round ship” of Northern Europe slowly eclipsed the oared “long ship,” or galley, of the Mediterranean. European leaders with maritime ambitions had their shipwrights cut ports into the hulls of these rugged, seaworthy ships for huge, heavy cannon. Naval warfare changed as they added sails and guns and replaced oarsmen and warriors with smaller, more efficient crews. They substituted sail power for human energy and thereby created a machine that harnessed unparalleled mobility, speed, and destructive power. Thus when the full-rigged ship equipped with muzzle-loading cannon showed up on the coasts of Africa, Asia, and America, it was by all accounts a marvel if not a terror. The noise of the cannon alone was terrifying. Indeed it was enough, one empire builder explained, to induce non-Europeans to worship Jesus Christ.
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European rulers would use this revolutionary technology, this new maritime machine, to sail, explore, and master the high seas in order to trade, to fight, to seize new lands, to plunder, and to build empires. In so doing they battled each other as fiercely as they battled peoples outside Europe. Thanks in large part to the carrack, the galleon, and finally the full-rigged, three-masted, cannon-carrying ship, they established a new capitalist order. They rapidly became masters of the planet, a point that was not lost on the African king Holiday of Bonny, who explained to slave-ship captain Hugh Crow, “God make you sabby book and make big ship.”
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The ship was thus central to a profound, interrelated set of economic changes essential to the rise of capitalism: the seizure of new lands, the expropriation of millions of people and their redeployment in growing market-oriented sectors of the economy; the mining of gold and silver, the cultivating of tobacco and sugar; the concomitant rise of long-distance commerce; and finally a planned accumulation of wealth and capital beyond anything the world had ever witnessed. Slowly, fitfully, unevenly, but with undoubted power, a world market and an international capitalist system emerged. Each phase of the process, from exploration to settlement to production to trade and the construction of a new economic order, required massive fleets of ships and their capacity to transport both expropriated laborers and the new commodities. The Guineaman was a linchpin of the system.

The specific importance of the slave ship was bound up with the other foundational institution of modern slavery, the plantation, a form of economic organization that began in the medieval Mediterranean, spread to the eastern Atlantic islands (the Azores, Madeiras, Canaries, and Cape Verde), and emerged in revolutionary form in the New World, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America during the seventeenth century.
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The spread of sugar production in the 1650s unleashed a monstrous hunger for labor power. For the next two centuries, ship after ship disgorged its human cargo, originally in many places European indentured servants and then vastly larger numbers of African slaves, who were purchased by planters, assembled in large units of production, and forced, under close and violent supervision, to mass-produce commodities for the world market. Indeed, as C. L. R. James wrote of laborers in San Domingue (modern Haiti), “working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time.” By 1713 the slave plantation had emerged as “the most distinctive product of European capitalism, colonialism, and maritime power.”
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One machine served another. A West Indian planter wrote in 1773 that the plantation should be a “well constructed machine, compounded of various wheels, turning different ways, and yet all contributing to the great end proposed.”
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Those turning the wheels were Africans, and the “great end” was the unprecedented accumulation of capital on a world scale. As an essential part of the “plantation complex,” the slave ship helped Northern European states, Britain in particular, to break out of national economic limits and, in Robin Blackburn’s words, “to discover an industrial and global future.”
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The wide-ranging, well-armed slave ship was a powerful sailing machine, and yet it was also something more, something sui generis, as Thomas Gordon and his contemporaries knew. It was also a factory and a prison, and in this combination lay its genius and its horror. The word “factory” came into usage in the late sixteenth century as global trade expanded. Its root word was “factor,” a synonym at the time for “merchant.” A factory was therefore “an establishment for traders carrying on business in a foreign country.” It was a merchant’s trading station.
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The fortresses and trading houses built on the coast of West Africa, like Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast and Fort James on Bance Island in Sierra Leone, were thus “factories” but so, too, were ships themselves, as they were often permanently anchored near shore in other, less-developed areas of trade and used as places of business. The decks of the ship were the nexus for exchange of Africa-bound cargo such as textiles and firearms, Europe-bound cargo such as gold and ivory, and America-bound cargo such as slaves. Seaman James Field Stanfield sailed in 1774 from Liverpool to Benin aboard the slave ship
Eagle,
which was to be “left on the coast as a floating factory.”
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The ship was a factory in the original meaning of the term, but it was also a factory in the modern sense. The eighteenth-century deep-sea sailing ship was a historic workplace, where merchant capitalists assembled and enclosed large numbers of propertyless workers and used foremen (captains and mates) to organize, indeed synchronize, their cooperation. The sailors employed mechanical equipment in concert, under harsh discipline and close supervision, all in exchange for a money wage earned in an international labor market. As Emma Christopher has shown, sailors not only worked in a global market, they produced for it, helping to create the commodity called “slave” to be sold in American plantation societies.
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The slave ship was also a mobile, seagoing prison at a time when the modern prison had not yet been established on land. This truth was expressed in various ways at the time, not least because incarceration (in barracoons, fortresses, jails) was crucial to the slave trade. The ship itself was simply one link in a chain of enslavement. Stanfield called it a “floating dungeon,” while an anonymous defender of the slave trade aptly called it a “portable prison.” Liverpool sailors frequently noted that when they were sent to jail by tavern keepers for debt and from there bailed out by ship captains who paid their bills and took their labor, they simply exchanged one prison for another. And if the slave ship seemed a prison to a sailor, imagine how it seemed to a slave locked belowdecks for sixteen hours a day and more. As it happened, the noble and useful machine described by Thomas Gordon benefited certain parts of mankind more than others.
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Malachy Postlethwayt was a British merchant and a lobbyist for the Royal African Company. Striving in the mid-1740s to persuade Parliament to subsidize the slave trade by paying for the upkeep of the fortresses and factories in West Africa, he asserted the centrality of the slave trade to the British Empire. His own position and economic interests perhaps made him exaggerate his claims on behalf of the trade, but, when viewed from the longer perspective of the eighteenth century, after the slave trade expanded dramatically beyond what he could have foreseen, some of his thoughts would become basic ruling-class wisdom about the trade and its place in a larger “political arithmetic” of empire.
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Postlethwayt stated his main argument in the title of his first pamphlet,
The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America,
published in London in 1745. He began with the claim that “our
West Indian
and
African Trades
are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on.” He knew that the plantation revolution had transformed the empire and that both depended on the shipment of labor power. As for the plantation and slave ship, “the one cannot subsist without the other.” He also pointed out that the slave trade was important to Britain’s rising capitalist manufactures: a slave ship’s “Cargo rightly sorted for Africa, consists of about Seven-Eights
British
Manufactures and Produce; and they return us not inconsiderable profit.” He repeated a long-standing argument that would become controversial in debates in the 1780s: the slave trade created a “great Brood of Seamen” and was therefore a “formidable Nursery of Naval Power.” The slave ship thus produced both slave and seafaring labor power.